Quantum Supremacy using a Programmable Superconducting Processor

Ping Yeh
Edward Farhi
Ben Chiaro
Travis Humble
Z. Jamie Yao
Alexander Korotkov
Andre Petukhov
Andrew Dunsworth
Rupak Biswas
Sergey Knysh
Austin Fowler
Mike Lindmark
Fernando Brandao
Michael Hartmann
Dmitry Lyakh
David Buell
Steve Habegger
Benjamin Villalonga
Frank Arute
Xiao Mi
Salvatore Mandrà
Brooks Foxen
Keith Guerin
Kristel Michielsen
Eleanor G. Rieffel
Fedor Kostritsa
Masoud Mohseni
Alan Ho
Matt Trevithick
Markus Rudolf Hoffmann
Eric Ostby
Rami Barends
Amit Vainsencher
John Martinis
Josh Mutus
Sergei Isakov
Trent Huang
Anthony Megrant
Charles Neill
William Courtney
Vadim Smelyanskiy
Jimmy Chen
Roberto Collins
Yu Chen
Kevin Jeffery Sung
Rob Graff
Dave Landhuis
Kunal Arya
Kostyantyn Kechedzhi
Nature, 574 (2019), 505–510

Abstract

The promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here we report the use of a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 2^53 (about 10^16). Measurements from repeated experiments sample the resulting probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times-our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years. This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum supremacy for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing paradigm.

Research Areas